Closer Than A Friend Series

In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was just another second-year computer programming student at Harvard. Partly for fun and partly to see if he could do it, Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard's security network, where he copied the student ID images used by the dormitories. He then used the photos to create a platform that he called “Facemash” (Bellis, M. The History of Facebook and How it Was Invented. Thoughtco.com, February 6, 2020). What Zuckerberg’s new platform did was to place two student photos side-by-side and asked the site’s visitors to vote on which student was "hot" and who was "not" (Bellis, Ibid.). On October 28 of that year, the university shut the site down and Zuckerberg was charged with a breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. All charges against him were eventually dropped.

A year later, on February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched a new website called “TheFacebook,” named after the directories that Harvard handed out to help university students get to know one another better. Membership to the website was at first restricted to Harvard students. As its popularity grew on campus, however, Zuckerberg enlisted the aid of a few of his fellow students to help grow the website and they expanded the site to additional universities and colleges (Bellis, Ibid.) where it also became very popular very quickly. In that same year, 2004, Napster founder and angel investor Sean Parker became the company's president (Kirkpatrick, D. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). The company changed the site's name from “TheFacebook” to just “Facebook” after purchasing the domain name “facebook.com” in 2005 for $200,000. In the following year, the venture capital firm, Accel Partners, invested $12.7 million in the company. That same year, Facebook created a version for high school students and company employees. In September of 2006, Facebook announced that anyone who was at least 13 years old and had a valid email address could join and by 2009, it had become the world's most used social networking service, according to a report by the analytics site Compete.com. (Bellis, Ibid.). Facebook is worth just under $280 billion dollars today.

In 2008, New York Times writer Hal Niedzviecki (“Neyet-vich-key”) decided to join Facebook. At first he connected with relatives and friends he’d had known over the years. Then it expanded to include friends of friends, and then friends of friends of friends until he had over seven hundred on-line friends. He was amazed and overwhelmed with the social media’s ability to connect him with the world.

Over time, he began to wonder about his on-line “friends.” How many of them were actually, well, “friends”? To find out, he planned a “Facebook party” so that he could actually meet some of his many digital “friends” in the flesh and get to know them better. He knew a lot about them from their Facebook profiles and his interaction with them on his computer but, still, he thought it might be better if they could all sit down and talk face-to-face. Niedzviecki (“Neyet-vich-key”) invited his seven hundred friends to join him for a drink at a local bar.

He watched in anticipation to see how many would accept his invitation. Fifteen said they’d be there … 60 gave him a solid “maybe” … some said “no” … but most didn’t respond at all (Jeremiah, D. What Are You Afraid Of? Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013, p. 116). In his mind, Niedzviecki (“Neyet-vich-key”) expected about 20 or so of his seven hundred on-line “friends” to show up.

On the night of the party, Niedzviecki (“Neyet-vich-key”) went to the bar, found a seat, and waited … and waited … and waited. Finally a nice lady showed up … a friend of a friend. They talked for awhile but it was clear that they both felt pretty awkward. The conversation quickly faded and she left. Niedzviecki (“Neyet-vich-key”) sat there … alone … until midnight … nursing his drink and wondering where all his so-called on-line friends were. “Seven hundred friends,” he wrote in his article about the experience, “and I was drinking alone” (Niedzviecki, H. Facebook in a Crowd. New York Times, October 24, 2008).

There are over 200 well known social networking websites. The most popular and well-known are Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, Instagram, Tumblr, and Tiktok (Ortiz-Ospina, E. Ourworldindata.org, September 18, 2019). Here’s something to think about. There are 7.7 billion people in the world today. At least 3.5 billion are online, which means that social media platforms are being used by one-in-three people in the world and more than two-thirds of all internet users (Ortiz-Ospina, Ibid.). Which begs the question: With so many ways to stay connected to so many people, why are we so lonely? In fact, we’re so lonely that we had to invent a new word for it: “autophobia.”